Jailed Unionist Appeals to French Comrades

Greetings. I am sending to you this letter from the Tabriz Central Prison. I am a member of Tehran’s Organizing Committee for Construction Painting, and Decorations Union. I was arrested by the Intelligence Ministry agents on September 6, 2011. I have endured four unremitting months of threats, torture and duress. I went on a hunger strike lasting 32 days. They have sentenced me to 11 years in jail for the crime of organizing painters in a trade union. I am now serving the sentence in a cell for common embezzlers at Tabriz prison.

Through hard work and sacrifice, you have been able to form unions. You can now defend your rights. In Iran it is a different story. They have thwarted our efforts at every stage. Arrest and imprisonment awaits all those who think of forming a union. The government is signatory to international covenants guaranteeing union rights but routinely ignores its obligations. In one day, hundreds of bus drivers in Tehran were detained for going on strike.

I could recite the names of hundreds of labor activists who have been persecuted in recent years. If you find it necessary, you can ask other labor activists who are fortunately free at the moment in Iran and to prepare for you a complete list of the workers jailed, arrested, and prosecuted. Then, you will see how thousands of workers have been fired, persecuted, sentenced, jailed, and executed in Iran under the rule of the Islamic Republic.

Then you will see that we workers in Iran do not have any rights and the Islamic Republic does not abide by international obligations and even its own laws.

I am asking you to:

1. Choose representatives amongst yourselves to research into the prosecution of workers by the Islamic Republic so you will see to the depth of the catastrophe.

2. Choose representatives amongst yourselves to research into the Workers House which has been an accomplice to the police and an instrument of suppression and deception in the last 33 years. After finding the real truth about the Workers House, severe your ties with it and ask all international worker organizations to stop Workers House and its representatives to masquerade as the representative of the Iranian workers in international gatherings.

3. After necessary research, find out about the repression of the unions and workers organizations, put pressure on the Iranian government to follow through its obligations regarding workers’ rights.

4. If possible, find me lawyers who can submit my complaints for torture and for confinement and imprisonment without any evidence to competent judicial authorities.

5. In the end, I ask you, once you found the truth about workers’ conditions and how activists are rotting in Iran’s jails, to help us win our freedom.

Where in the world an 11 year jail term has been handed down to labor activists for attempting to form a union?

This is a partial list of the name of the workers who have been persecuted which I have committed to memory: